


Tired

by Seek_The_Mist



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Holiday Fic Exchange, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Late at Night, M/M, Pre-The Raven Boys, canon compliant if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 12:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17305034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seek_The_Mist/pseuds/Seek_The_Mist
Summary: One late night, full of healing stretches on his arm, Ronan is having a hard time coping with pain and solitude. Noah's uncanny ability to always appear, especially uninvited, offers a great deal of comfort.Written for TRC Gen&Rarepair Winter Exchange 2018!





	Tired

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Imnotweirdjustwriting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imnotweirdjustwriting/gifts).



> First of all, happy new year to everyone!  
>   
> Ronan and Noah definitely give me too many feelings for me to really know what to do with them, but I sure as hell tried to convey it.  
> Chesney, darling, I hope you enjoy your gift fully!  
> Thanks to Kay, who helped me hunt the typos down, and to the organisers for the rare pair wave, may it drag us through 2019 in glory!

  
  
  
The painkillers had worn off.

The harsh reality of the fact lingered in the mess of Ronan’s room in Monmouth Manufacturing, unevenly lit with four different lamps even in the middle of the night. 

One of the lightbulbs was ancient, literally incandescent after having been on for eight hours since sunset. Ronan stared at it directly, long enough for his eyes to lose focus of it, for a deep ache to settle at the corner of his eyelids. The lampshade was a paper-thin orange fabric. Maybe it would catch fire, if the lightbulb could get hot enough. Ronan could almost picture it consuming in the heat, patches of destruction spreading and conflating until nothing was left. He could picture it so well that he stopped and dropped his forehead on his knees, least his mind decided to conjure his fantasies into existence. 

An impression of the lightbulb remained dancing against his closed eyes. The throbbing of it only heightened the pangs of pain that cursed through Ronan’s body.

The painkillers had worn off. 

There was something disgustingly mundane and yet completely surreal about pain. 

It coursed through Ronan’s body, steadily crushing his stomach in what felt more like a spiral than a knot, with the top turn pressing at the back of his throat. If Ronan concentrated enough, he could pinpoint the source of the collapse to his forearm, of course, but bodies were not meant to be this subtle and the net result was just a wave of nausea — as if throwing up would solve anything. 

At the same time — exactly because the predicament was this hopeless and not all sections of his stupid body seemed to be equally sensitive to the misery of it — Ronan felt more in possession of a random collection of badly assembled chunks of pulsing flesh than a coherent physical form. It was debatable that his disoriented consciousness was hanging onto a shape that everyone would recognise as _Ronan_.

Both perceptions were insidious, but the second one was borderline to a threat. How would he know if he had fallen asleep, if reality already toppled over into a dream? 

The clock on the nightstand, inundated by light, flashed 4:57 am. Ronan had followed its progresses since 2:02, but he couldn’t be sure the alarm hadn’t dutifully followed him into a fever sleep. And if it hadn't yet, it would.

Thoroughness did not suit him, as Declan was very fond of reminding him, but Ronan still made a desperate attempt at it and weighted his limited chances. He could stay like this, hope that the pain will keep him awake instead of morphing in something unspeakable, maybe even have a fight with Gansey who would come by around 4.30 am for his nanny obligations. He could go now and find Gansey, instead, even with the fight option still open, and get the painkillers to wrestle sleep until morning — at best, some drug induced stupor in lieu of it.

He looked at the bandages on his forearm. Underneath, the hidden scratches were bloated, radiating pain in waves to the point that it was difficult to move his hand or fingers. Bending the arm at the elbow was agonising and every position Ronan might assume turned into a miserable tension somewhere else in his body, prompting him to move within ten minutes.

Would his suffering be a beacon for the nightmares, if he were to fall asleep like this? Would it suggest them to come and finish him, annihilating everything around him for good measure?

In the end, when Ronan chose, it didn't feel like he had other options.

The open space outside of his door constituted the most of the second floor of Monmouth Manufacturing. It was Gansey's rightful kingdom, an embodied fraction of his restless mind. Ronan had half expected darkness to engulf it, and instead some neon lights were on, stubbornly. It was still a less obnoxious illumination than what Ronan was subjecting himself to, and the change was disorienting.

He shuffled around, barefoot. Randomly, the first thing that came into the dubious focus of his eyes was a pile of unevenly cut cardboard. There were scissors, tape, and glue scattered around and some new geometrical shapes arising from whatever was being rearranged.

Following the clutter from the cardboard pile to the overcrowded desk, up to a trail of papers and books towards the bed, was sufficient to find Gansey. He sat on the floor next to the bed, one arm up still holding a surprisingly mundane pencil; his head rested on the mattress, with a halo of handwritten notes to surround it. 

Ronan did not linger on the scribbles — unintelligible in the best days — but knew from experience that Glendower’s name would permeate them. Tracing the days of Gansey’s insomnia through the dark circles under his closed eyes was almost as trivial — Ronan knew they followed the same schedule of the bandages and then some, between check-ins and worried looks and casual provision of food. 

“Saint fucking Dick,” Ronan murmured under his breath, picking up a plaid from the bed and wrapping it delicately around Gansey’s shoulders. “The patron saint of the lost causes.”

With less of a cold draft on his back, Gansey huffed slightly, and exhaustion settled him more squarely into his slumber. It was one of those things Ronan would never deprive another human of — especially not Gansey — so he turned on his heels and went back to his room. For once, the door did not bang to mark his passage.

The obsessive lighting was immediately worthy of a wince and filled Ronan with the frustration of a pointless exercise. One by one, he flipped every switch, until the room was left in the encompassing blue glow radiating from a fake snowball on a shelf — possibly for the irony of not knowing where it came from. Ronan sagged on the bed and stared at it. His father seemed more like a possible source than a thrift shop, and that hurt in its own right, as if everything else didn’t suffice. 

He fidgeted around on the mattress, landing on his right side, arm outstretched. There might be the faint hope that pressing his weight on his shoulder would drag his limbs into numbness, and it was preferable for his arm to be asleep rather than himself, Ronan figured. He stared and waited and the more he looked at his bandages the more he wanted to bite them, spiteful. 

The digital numbers of the clock kept dutifully flashing, disregarded in the abandoned count. 

At some point, Ronan wasn’t asleep and wasn’t awake. For lack of better definition, he must be rather close to delirious.

The painkillers had worn off, and he wasn’t getting any more.

“I don’t know if I can tell you where the painkillers are.”

Noah’s voice filtered in Ronan’s mind like an interference slowly crackling into focus, completely foreign for a moment — almost outworldly — before Ronan stumbled upon the knowledge that maybe he did know the sound and the sound meant Noah and he knew Noah too, apparently.

Ronan blinked, laboriously, and even Noah’s figure was smudged, diffused in the blue light. He hadn’t heard Noah knocking, or coming in. “The door was closed,” he rasped out. 

Noah kept staring at him as if the concept was inconsequential. And possibly it was, even more so because Ronan was definitely not in the right shape or mindset to kick him out bodily.

“Of course you can’t tell me,” Ronan conceded, going back to the painkillers. “You’re not the designated babysitter, Gansey is sleeping and you don’t give addicting drugs to someone _suicidal_.” 

The sound of the word itself filled Ronan with bitterness and he made sure to try and convey it all, syllable after syllable. Not that Gansey could have thought anything else, having found Ronan in a pool of blood with marks deep enough on his forearm to require a top-notch work of stichting. 

“I don’t think you’re suicidal,” Noah murmured, sitting down on Ronan’s bed. He only acknowledged Ronan’s glare at the proximity with a vague fidgeting. 

“Fucking awesome. Care to tell that to Dick? Let the painkillers flow while he goes to sleep and I change my own bandages,” Ronan snarled.

He was tired of the constant checks, of Gansey hovering around him and taking care of him as if something in the process would finally provide him the answer of why would Ronan _do this to him_. He was tired, guiltily so.

“I’m not sure you always want to live either,” Noah added.

“Well, fuck you very much, too.” Ronan snapped, raking his left hand over his scalp. It was still startling, at times, to find no hair there, only friction. This was one of those times, almost nauseous with insomnia and with a hurting arm that refused to dull into tingling. “Why are you even here, Noah?”

Noah huffed at the tone, shrugging asymmetrically. “I’m always here.”

“You fucking stalker,” Ronan growled, staring up at him. Between the light, and the blurriness of his own vision, Noah looked almost crooked, a side of his face sunk in shadows, and eyes almost too big and too bright staring back at him. “I know you are.”

At least it felt like knowing it. Ronan had a vague recollection of Noah — as a concept, as a face — at the corner of the ambulance while the sirens blared. Then once again after the doctors had stitched him up and Ronan had been on the verge of passing out, rather than sleeping. On and off in odd points, when he had probably been more drugged than he had imagined. Throughout his stay at the hospital, even while Gansey complained about not being allowed in with the same frequency of Declan — who Ronan hadn’t wanted to see — and Matthew — who shouldn’t have had to see Ronan like this. 

So deep in the night, everything in the room was silent, and Ronan could hear his uneven breathing matching the fluttering of his ribcage. Noah’s hand next to his own, next to his bandages, filled Ronan with something twisted.

“Why are you here?” he repeated, much less spitefully with some luck.

“Because you’re tired.”

Ronan gave a shakey, joyless laugh that made his sternum ache even more. Straight ahead in his field of vision, the fingers of his own right hand twitched. He didn’t notice that Noah had reached over, stroking his thumb at the centre of Ronan’s palm. He noticed after the touch, chilling and delicate, and yet remarkably persistent, like an anchor. 

“You’re fucking cold,” Ronan slurred. He didn’t flinch away, though, and Noah just rubbed sideways, following the creases of his skin. 

“Gansey is sleeping. Why don’t you sleep too?” Noah suggested, as if it were easy. 

Ronan laughed again, or at least he tried, because the result was more wheezing than he expected. “Because I can’t. Of course I can’t. I’m not this stupid, and this shit _hurts_.”

If it didn’t make sense as a confession — in all likelihood, how could it? — Noah didn’t point it out, humming as if he was singing along the rhythm of Ronan’s words. He ran his thumb downwards, caressing against the ball of Ronan’s hand, and then their palms were pressing fully against each other. Or maybe they were just brushing, as if Noah wasn’t exerting any force in his touch at all. 

“I can look over you, while you sleep,” Noah whispered, like a promise.

The room was spinning around, no matter how much Ronan tried to focus on the solidity of the mattress underneath him, so evidently still. “You don’t understand. That’s dangerous, you don’t understand.”

If Ronan weren’t selfish and self-absorbed — as Declan would always make sure to remind him, or at least imply — he would tell Noah to get going, go to his room and lock the door, go to his room and lock Ronan’s door and put something in front of it for good measure. The hopelessness of the mental picture was almost adrenalinic. Noah spread his hand and twined their fingers together and Ronan could not let go, even though it was cold, and dangerous.

“It’s okay. I’ll wake you up, if you are feeling bad. I will wake you up.” 

Noah was still in his sight, half-shadows, half-blue light, surreal and almost translucent, but his voice felt like a whisper directly in Ronan’s ear.

“Noah, what if I hurt you…”

Ronan heard his voice cracking, but Noah hummed again, serenely. Or maybe it wasn’t Noah, Noah was just there, watching down steadily, but Mum used to hum and smile when Ronan was upset. Ronan’s forearm throbbed in sympathy of the additional pain.

“You won’t,” Noah seemed very sure of himself, especially for a scaredy cat. This wasn’t even a skateboard matter, and they they could _probably do it_. 

Noah was playing with Ronan’s fingers, slowly, and suddenly the thought of losing him was overwhelming. Irrational, if it weren’t for the crazy screeches of his own nightmares, thirsty for blood after they caught a glimpse of it — on the driveaway, under Dad’s head — and got a taste of it, from Ronan himself.

“What if I do. What if — if I kill you, if…”

“It’s a bit late for that, Ronan.”

It made no sense, of course, but Noah sounded unspeakably sad regardless. Maybe it was because Ronan was crashing, and as usual the damages of his failures propagated throughout everyone and everything he cared about. When another chilling touch landed on his skin, rubbing the skin of Ronan’s temple exactly where it was the most scorching, the statement itself morphed into comfort. If it was too late to worry, he might as well stay locked in the present and let Noah comfort him — no time left to question deserving it, or the insidious consequences that could unleash.

“It’ll be fine,” Noah reassured, as if he could be sure. “Just until Gansey wakes up, the whole place can be asleep.”

“But not you?”

“Not me, but I don’t count.”

There was something feverish about any point of Ronan’s being that was not being stroked by Noah’s icy hands. His own eyes were playing tricks to him — Noah was there, not there, reflecting blue light, emerging ashen-faced and decaying from the shadows — so Ronan let his eyelids drop for good. 

“You really have no fucking idea, Noah. You don’t.” Ronan insisted, contrary even and especially towards his own wishes. 

A low sound whistled and solidified into a laughter, Noah’s laughter, as Ronan recognised after a second. “You don’t either, but you don’t see me being a bitch about it.”

Ronan wanted to laugh as well — incongruent and maybe a bit hysterical — but his chest was tight and he was way too tired. Hopefully Noah would get the sentiment from his huff, and kept him company some minutes longer.

They were still holding hands, not very tight but remarkably solid considering the state of Ronan’s arm. The light touch rubbing on his temple wandered further, along the crown of Ronan’s shaved hair, the line of his eyebrows, the sharpness of his cheekbones. When a caress circled at the edge of his jaw, playful on the side of his ear, Ronan shivered and tilted his head better, not-so-subtly angling for more. 

It felt nice, uncomplicated, ecstatic. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Noah.” Ronan whispered. 

He would never be good at it, at this, at sincerity, but it was somewhat easier now, to try. He would never have the words for people that loved him even though Ronan was, arguably, a surreal being that shaped monsters from his mind — and thus, monstrous himself. That was too much gratitude even for this deranged night. 

“I’m glad I’m here, too.” Noah said, and Ronan could almost picture the toothy smile. “I’m not sure I would be, if you and everything you are were not to exist, you know?”

Ronan didn’t, it didn’t make much sense. But he hummed, because even blabbering was better than the suffocating silence.

“Sleep, Ronan,” Noah suggested again, profoundly reassuring. “I’m good with secrets. I won’t let them catch you.”

An inhale, an exhale, and Ronan curled more fully towards Noah. The slow caresses kept brushing against Ronan’s head — cheek, neck, _lips_ — and if his hand twitched his palm would get rubbed until the grip relaxed again. At times, it was so delicate a whiff of air could just easily replace the sensation of it. 

All things considered, it wasn’t so unlikely that Ronan was already dreaming, a weirdly kind dream with Noah being affectionate. It would be nice, for a dream like this to lead Ronan up to the morning.

Even outside of a dream, Noah would never be a snitch, even though Gansey insisted Noah had been terrified for Ronan, that he had found him. Tomorrow, the routine will start again, and Ronan would be arguably suicidal, lonely and angry, and the pain will be impossible to ignore.

Tonight, he was just tired. 

Between one faint touch and the next from Noah, Ronan fell asleep.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading and I hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Comments, kudos and incoherent screaming in the ask box of [my Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com) are always appreciated!
> 
> Until the next burst of feels! ❤


End file.
